


won't someone spread the ocean on our ceiling

by vagarius



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, La Maison en Petits Cubes, Platonic Relationships, The House of Small Cubes AU, Vignettes, very short vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 11:43:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3380267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vagarius/pseuds/vagarius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>It wasn’t scary at first, only a little odd.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>All Haru remembers is waking up one day to find a pretty pond on his bedroom floor, and his fish swimming around amongst the broken-glass lily pads and newspaper flowers.</em>
</p>
<p>The ocean steadily rises, the world is steadily submerged, and while some keep building their houses higher, others start losing hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	won't someone spread the ocean on our ceiling

“Can I call you Haru?”

Left utterly perplexed, Haru simply nods in affirmation, face turned towards his shoes.

The boy ( _Makoto,_ he calls himself) stares at him with hopeful green eyes. Frankly, his enthusiasm is exhausting.

Haru looks up long enough to see the boy smile.

“Okay, Haru-chan!”

-

Iwatobi is a small town, consisting of Haru and Makoto and the endless ocean.

There's more to the world than just Iwatobi, Haru knows, but Iwatobi has all the important things, like little boys who like to play with stray kittens and salt-misted air and places to swim.

And while the world is overwhelming, Iwatobi is home.

-

It wasn’t scary at first, only a little odd.

All Haru remembers is waking up one day to find a pretty pond on his bedroom floor, and his fish swimming around amongst the broken-glass lily pads and newspaper flowers.

He remembers wanting to stay and watch, and wanting to wait for the pond to become deep enough to swim in, and not wanting to follow his parents onto the roof to wait with Grandma when he could wait in his room and watch fish swim.

All that the roof had to offer was bricks and building glue.

-

The way it works; if Haru is scared, there is a 99% chance that Makoto is terrified.

And while Haru’s emotions will stabilize themselves in a corner of indifference as time goes on, Makoto’s fear rises with the ocean and flows with the waves -

_(They make a beautiful cacophony, a soft orchestra of a storm.)_

\- and crashes with every smile he forces himself to make.

-

A boat brings him to school.

The school feels narrower now, and maybe it is. Grandma says that as a person grows and ages, things and places start to do that, but he doesn’t think that’s the reason.

-

A typhoon hits the outskirts of Iwatobi, drowning boats as close as three kilometers away.

Masked figures stand on the docks.

Haru feels Makoto grip his hand a little tighter.

-

His parents move away, and they almost manage to take Haru with them.

But if Haru is anything, it's stubborn, and he would not stand for leaving Iwatobi, because leaving Iwatobi meant leaving the important things for an unimportant world.

Leaving meant that something would be gone, and he'd rather be given an empty space than make one.

-

When swim classes start, he’s eleven.

They learn and practice in the open ocean, school staff members stationed periodically in the water. If you can’t swim, it’s mandatory, and if you can, it’s not.

Haru participates anyway, with Makoto watching him intently from the dock, ready to pull him out of the water while saying that _you really are the best in the water, Haru-chan._

-

There’s one kid in particular that struggles in the water.

It’s obvious he’s not afraid of it (like Makoto is), but it’s also obvious that he can’t swim. Both a staff member and a little blond boy reside permanently at the kid’s side. The kid holds a kickboard in his hands, blue hair plastered to his face.

The water probably doesn’t like him.

-

The little blond boy and the struggling boy are a year younger than him.

Their names are Hazuki Nagisa and Ryugazaki Rei, and they couldn’t be more different.

Ryugazaki is a bit of a social outcast, nose stuffed in a book more often than not, calculating and memorizing, hiding and theorizing.

And while Ryugazaki is endlessly polite, Hazuki barges in, going straight to calling him “Haru-chan” and chatting up both himself and Makoto.

They make an interesting pair, to say in the least.

-

Teaching Ryugazaki to swim is a lot easier than anticipated.

He listens and doesn’t argue. He’s determined and cooperative. But he still can’t swim.

He has to, eventually.

-

A fire flies across the water one day, and leaves the next.

_(Another empty space.)_

Haru figures it’s probably for the best.

-

 “M-my parents, they, they were talking about how they wanted another kid, but they can’t have another kid, b-because they already had to take care of me, and, and, it’s my fault, isn’t it? It’s my fault they can’t have another kid ‘cause it’d be too much while I’m still here, and, oh god, it’s my fault, Haru-chan, it’s – “

“It’s not your fault. Don’t worry Makoto, it’s not your fault.”

“But, Haru –“

“Shh, no more of that. It’s not your fault.”

“No… more…”

-

Haru still firmly believes that if something is important, it stays in Iwatobi.

But now, instead of little boys with stray kittens, it's little boys with other little boys, dancing on docks and dreaming up adventures and saying _when the grass grows back, we can make wishes on dandelions, since shooting stars are such a pain to wait for._

_(Haru feels guilty, sometimes – the one time he did see a shooting star, he had wished for nothing to ever change._

_He doesn't mention it.)_

-

“Grandma? Why bother remembering all these stories? It seems like so much effort."

“Sure, it takes a little effort, but these stories are worth remembering. Especially in times where memories are common as river stones yet more precious than gold.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The woman laughs. “Whatever you want it to mean.”

-

His parents leave him when he’s 9, and it’s okay.

His grandma dies when he’s 13, and it’s much less okay.

He’s not sure what to make of that.

-

The rest of junior high passes in a blur of _MakotoNagisaRei,_ and Haru couldn't ask for a better distraction.

-

"Everything is so much weirder when it matters," Nagisa says one day, sitting on the dock next to Haru's house. Rei sits to Nagisa's left, and Makoto is at his right, leaving Haru on the end next to Makoto.

"Do explain, Nagisa-kun."

"Hmm..." Nagisa taps his chin, as if he's thinking hard. "Just take swimming, for example." He stops his explanation there, happily picking at his nails.

"That's not a complete explanation, Nagisa-kun."

_("But I still get it," is left unsaid.)_

-

They all still hang out, even when school is cancelled.

Nagisa calls it a miracle that he won't have to worry about entrance exams, and says that _school was useless, anyway,_ which leaves Rei appalled. Makoto laughs, but his smile is rough at the edges.

Haru is as stoic as always.

-

“Hey, Haru,” – a shaky sigh – “What if we could swim forever?”

Haru blinks and tilts his head, then turns it. “But we can’t,” he says.

“Yeah, but if we could, would you want to?”

A moment too long. “Yeah.”

_(He turns his head away from Makoto, if only to escape the lost eyes that no longer look straight at him.)_

-

It's a few days after waking up to damp feet and soggy floors that Haru is given yet another empty space.

It's when the Tachibana household (which was really nothing but a house) is replaced by air and sky. It's when he holds his breath and dives under the surface. It's when he finds Makoto with blue lips and useless limbs inside a lifeless room full of left over emotion.

It's when he rises and gasps for air, and it's when the air is supposed to make his lungs burn with reprieve, but it doesn't.

It's when he feels nothing but a foreign coolness on his skin, and a not-so-foreign ache somewhere around his heart.

-

Nagisa is the first to hear, because he's closest in terms of physical distance, and he's the least likely to admonish Haru for swimming to his house.

They immediately go to tell Rei thereafter, who does admonish them for swimming all the way to his apartment building, but swims back to Haru's nonetheless.

"Now what?" Nagisa asks, wrapped in towels, staring directly at the empty space he doesn't see.

Rei simply bows his head, folds his hands, and wishes Makoto a safe journey.

Haru does the same.

-

Nagisa's frequent visits shrink from daily to weekly to monthly to none, and Haru can't even remember what he said to him last, but he remembers when, because they talked three months ago, which is a month after Haru stopped caring, and five months ago, he hit a low, and a month before that, the hurt had caught up to him.

( _And he can't seem to remember the "why" of it, either, of anything, and he doesn't particularly care, not at this point, not in the least.)_

-

He shouldn't be surprised, not really.

Apartment complexes had gradually started to close down after he finished junior high, so it's only logical that Rei would lose his apartment at some point.

Living together is an expected solution.

-

Rei likes to sit out on the dock.

Most of the time, he’ll slip out of bed, and walk quietly to the door as if the rustle of covers didn’t wake up Haru in the first place, then move the door just enough to slide his slender body through the opening.

Other times, he doesn’t even come inside until some extremely late hour (or early, depending on how Haru looks at it).

Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the stars. Maybe it’s the gentle rocking of the wooden dock, slowly, slowly…

_(Haru likes to think it’s for him, sometimes; likes to think that Rei is sparing him from seeing the lost look in his eyes – the same lost look from a time not so long ago._

_That’s probably not the reason.)_

-

He’s 20, and things have yet to become ordinary.

-

"Do you miss them?" Haru asks one day – it's a day where the empty spaces suffocate him, and force strange things out of his throat.

Rei, to his credit, looks more resigned than sad, but only manages to nod in affirmation.

_(There are no important things left in Iwatobi.)_

-

**Author's Note:**

> La Maison en Petits Cubes (The House of Small Cubes) is a Japanese short [animated] film.


End file.
